The English Channel is a thousand miles wide. French novelists need to swim against quite a tide to make an impression in this country. Two who have managed it in the last decade are Michel Houellebecq, nihilistic, confrontational, cultivating his own unreasonableness - a pocket Céline - and Jean Echenoz, who is much more in the Anglo-Saxon grain - suave, droll and dry.

His new novel, Piano, marvellously displays these qualities in its opening section. If Mark Polizzotti's translation misses anything in terms of precision, elegance and syncopation, then the original has glitter to spare.

The story starts with two ill-assorted men killing time in a Paris park - middle-aged Max and younger, scruffier Bernie. Max will die in less than a month's time, but he has no premonition of that. He's afraid, but of something else. He's like a man facing execution, and Bernie is the man who refuses his last request for a cigarette (a drink, actually).

The mystery is sweetly resolved in a few pages: stage fright. Max is a concert pianist, Bernie his minder. The incompatibility between their characters becomes easy to understand: Max's job is to climb inside a piece of music and persuade a hall full of strangers to follow him, while Bernie's job is to keep Max sober and finally - since fear paralyses him until he's actually at the keyboard - to push him on stage.

When he's not performing or practising, Max daydreams about his lost love, Rose, and tries to strike up a friendship with a beautiful woman who lives nearby. She responds warmly to his greeting, 'without the slightest trace of a frown or self-protective spray made from natural pepper extracts', but nothing more comes of that.

The pleasure of reading about Max's inconsequential days as his deadline approaches comes from Echenoz's great gift for tone and timing. When Max is convinced he has glimpsed Rose on the metro, he tries to follow but gets nowhere. The narrative consoles itself, if not him, with a precarious aria of digression that Queneau or Nabokov would have been proud of:

'As nothing special is happening in this scene, we might take the time to look closely at this ticket. There's actually a lot that can be said about these tickets, about their secondary uses - toothpick, fingernail scraper, or paper cutter, guitar pick or plectrum, bookmark, crumb sweeper, conduit or straw for controlled substances, awning for a doll's house, micro-notebook, souvenir, or support for a phone number that you scribble for a girl in case of emergency - and their various fates - folded lengthwise in halves or quarters and liable to be slid under an engagement ring, signet ring, or wristwatch; folded in six or even eight in accordion fashion, ripped into confetti, peeled in a spiral like an apple, then tossed into the wastepaper-baskets of the metro system, on the floor of the system, between the tracks of the system, or even cast out of the system, in the gutter, the street, at home to play heads or tails: heads magnetic stripe, tails printed side - but perhaps this isn't the moment to go into all of that.'

Short book though it is, Piano divides sharply into three. In the second section, Max is staying at a fancy hotel while his ultimate destination is determined - either 'the park' or 'the urban zone'; it's a Last Judgment with room service. Max is fairly confident of being favourably assessed (neither Heaven nor Hell is mentioned at this point) since his history contains no real lapses: 'Naturally, he had suffered from doubt, alcoholism and acedia' - nothing serious.

It would be exaggerating to say that the book loses the plot when it leaves Paris, but the pleasure of reading Piano certainly goes into eclipse. There's actually more plot rather than less, and Echenoz has to devise a tenuous logic for his version of the afterlife. His command of what he is doing seems to follow Max into a limbo of its own.

The subject may be Last Things, but the stakes are low for all that; it was never the character who was so engaging in the first place, only the buoyancy of the prose in which he floated. The story seems to matter less and less as it develops, despite being in theory a matter of life and death. The jaunty tone sometimes rings hollow. To return to Paris, Max must smuggle 'a certain something' - 'the situation is so common that there isn't even any need to specify the nature of this something, enclosed in a lizard-skin valise with locked, gilded-metal straps...' This is the side of postmodernism which suggests exhaustion rather than play.

Even Max's return to Paris doesn't supply the necessary tonic, though there are lovely passages right up to the end, one about the awkward pathos of a solitary man trying to fold a sheet: 'Whereas a couple, folding the sheet together while talking about other things, have it much easier - not to mention the additional interest, the intimate strategy, of anticipating, on either side of the dividing sheet, which direction the other will turn it in so as to harmonise with his or her movement.'

Perhaps it spoils the lovely mood a little to realise that this tenderness is more or less arbitrary, devised by the author from on high rather than earned by the character at ground level, since Max has never been part of a couple.